lyons206: April 2012 Archives

When I think over all the things I have learned this year in Psych 1001, one of the first things that come to mind as something that I will remember down the line is definitely when we learned about the famous Milgram Experiment. The participants were told to administer electric shocks on the subjects taking the test. Each wrong response by the person "in the other room" results in a higher shock administered on them by the participants. As the voltages increased, an unbelievable thing happens. Even though they can hear the "painful" reactions of the person they believe is taking their test, amazingly the participants continue to proceed with the process. All because the experimenters claim it is absolutely necessary to go all the way until the words were learned. When watching this, it is shocking to see that just because they are told to continue by an authority figure, the participants shock the learner under the impression they could be seriously injured.

It is very hard to imagine that people would act like this, and wonder if you yourself could act similarly in like situations. It is unreal that 62% of participants administered what would have been lethal shock to the learners. I bet most people would never believe they would go that far, but more than half would be wrong...

Have you ever been scrolling through the channels of your television and can't find anything good on to watch? Well when this happens to me I usually get caught up watching The Maury Show and watching couple after couple getting back the test results of polygraphs their partner took.

Most of the people that are found to be guilty on the show argue that it "wasn't possible" and that they were innocent. Many of them even ask to retake the test, but I always seemed to convey guilt to me as the viewer. I believed this until I came across a topic in our textbook that would change my perspective in an interesting way. The topic concerns the Modern Polygraph Test and Evaluating the Polygraph Test: What's the Truth?. Through these two sections of the book, in chapter 11, I learned that the commonly used lie detector test that is given in the United States isn't as reliable as I believed. Actually, it is even referred to as being "biased against the innocent" and "yields a high rate of false positives, being those who the test incorrectly deems as guilty."(Iacono & Patrick, 2006; National Research Council, 2003). The test measures a person's physiological signals like changes in blood pressure, a person's breathing and even a person's skin for sweat!